BREAKING: Leonard Korir not going to Paris! 11 Universality athletes get in ahead of him!

What is a universality athlete?? R they going to pull this crap in the 10000m and 5000m?

It’s qualifying because of DEI

If one country has no qualified people in any other event, they can enter people in the 100m or marathon

This is the problem with the World Ranking system. Not the system itself, but that it isn't even used! Any athlete who took the system uncritically and prioritized their ranking has gotten a rude surprise.

If they really want the rankings system to work, they need to either set the auto standard for something like 2:04 or set aside a minimum number of spots that are guaranteed to be given out by ranking.

Totally agree, was about to post the same thing

And 11 universality athletes in a field of only 80? So 14% of the field is universality spaces now. They could have at least made universality places not count towards the field size, i.e. expand it to 91.

Time standards, A and B, was a much better system than the world rankings. Countries should hold a trials or select athletes with the standard under clear criteria. I suspect after this olympics only the biggest world athletics stans will care about the world rankings.

Since when World Athletics put that "universality qualifiers"?

Besides that, certain athletes have good PB's (Ivanovsky is faster than Korir this year, Han from North Korea ran 2:09:42 this year in China, Khadiri's PB is 2:10 from last year, Freire from Cabo Verde ran 2:11:01 this year, Zamora from Uruguay Ran 2:11:02 and 2:13 this year)

Looks like 0 people are going in for ranking, so it's not like US is the only one getting screwed here.

I think it's dumb to limit the marathon field as hard as they do. It's not like all the other track events that have limited space on the racing course and need to share track time with other events. They only do this because they don't want to spend a couple extra thousand per additional athlete and maybe a bit more to expand their starting line.

To alleviate a crowded start, just force starting position by seed time. If you got in by qualifying time, you get to go to the front, then you position by who was fastest. If you got in by ranking or universality, you start a few meters behind them.

Also just noticed they have 81 people qualified on Road to Paris but only 80 spots available per entry rules. So they gladly break the rules for Universality, but can't do it more to let actual competitors in.

Aren’t a few athletes banned for doping still on the road to Paris list? He should only need 3 removed to be in right?

Agreed, though I just think the world ranking system is stupid as heck to begin with. I'm not against the universality places either (they've been around a lot longer than DEI despite one commenter's rant above) but I think they should throw those guys in as additional entries rather than taking up the set limit. Especially in the marathon, it's no big deal to have a few extra competitors beyond the alleged limit.

wow this is really upsetting honestly, he deserves to go...even more upsetting because he has so much pride in our country as a solider (unlike so many other athletes across the board)

There's one

I know Yaseen Abdalla is a cool guy and all and he's competitive at the shorter distances, but his debut marathon is going to be the Olympics lmao. He hasn't even run a World Athletics recorded Half Marathon and now he's going to run a Marathon.

I guess technically he has some time between now and then to run one, but I don't know how they justified putting him there when at least all the other Universality guys have run a marathon in the qualifying window. Has no one else with Sudanese citizenship run a marathon in the last year and a half?

The other day when I asked where he stood on the list I was told I was stupid for not knowing that he was easily in.

This is a travesty. I liked the old A and B system. If they want to add in extra people make the field larger.

You can blame IOC prez for this. He is the one that has set limits on the number of athletes each sport can send to the olympics. It is his cost control measure to have a max size of participants at the olympics. Not sure what it is now, but when he first took over it was around 10,000.

He keeps wanting to add sports to the Olympics but not the number of Olympians. So, the # of athletes in the traditional sports has to be reduced to allow for breakdancing, and others.

Kevin Hanson was very confident just like the people blasting you. this didn't age very well

This is really a surprise. Nowhere in the document did it say that Universality would be put in ahead of rankings. On the other hand, it was clearly stated that the ranking quota as of May 5th would be locked in, and some federations had already selected athletes based on that line (Hugo Catrileo of Chile). Nowhere was it stated that Quota spots (which ranking spots fall under) and Universality spots are the same, and the document guaranteed 80 Quota spots. In my mind it’s a travesty, since athletes scheduled their season around gaining as many ranking spots as possible during the spring only for it to not matter at all. If Leonard Korir and his coach had known this, maybe they would have skipped the Lisbon half and had a better shot at the standard in Rotterdam. Unfortunately, there is a precendent for rankings being outweighed by universality so no one really has a case to argue, it just didn’t matter in previous years since only one universality spot was allowed in the marathon and standards exceeded the quota place limit. But if they want people to view rankings as being as important as they view standards, they cannot be pulling stuff like this at the last minute.

WHAT

It is not "DEI." This rule has been around for longer than the DEI movement. Well, you could say that the spirit of the Olympics is about inclusivity.

Why do you think each country traditionally was encouraged to send two or three athletes even when those athletes had no chance of winning? Why does any country besides the "powerhouses" even bother with the Olympics? It is about the spirit of international community.

I mean, that is literally the point of the Olympics.

p.s The Americans are terrible too, so it is no loss. If we want to be taken seriously, we have to have more than two guys in a nation of 300 million people who can break 2:08. Doesn't Japan have like 10? We got our two entries just like the other non-marathoning nations.

Unlike Kevin Hanson, I stated in a thread on this board back a few months that Lenny will NOT be going and I too was told to shove it.

Outside of the silly names for privacy reasons, I'm deeply involved in this sport.